Time & Perspective Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison slices the critic’s power down to size, then turns the knife on craft. A harsh review, she concedes, can sting, but only briefly; it belongs to the normal weather system of publishing. What she can’t tolerate is sloppiness. The real offense isn’t disapproval, it’s negligence - the sense that her work was processed, not encountered. For a writer who built novels out of layered voice, historical rupture, and deliberate gaps for the reader to cross, “took no time to really read the book” is a charge of professional malpractice.

The subtext is an argument about labor and respect. Morrison’s books demand attention: to syntax that can shift like oral storytelling, to characters carrying the afterlife of slavery, to meanings that arrive sideways. A “badly written” review announces that the critic hasn’t done the basic work of criticism: close reading, intellectual good faith, the humility to let a text be stranger than your preloaded take. That’s why the insult cuts deeper than a negative verdict. You can disagree with Morrison and still treat the book as an object worthy of care.

Context matters: Morrison wrote in a literary ecosystem that often asked Black writers to serve as sociological informants or moral lesson plans. A lazy review doesn’t just miss aesthetic choices; it risks flattening the project into stereotype or summary. Her complaint is less wounded ego than a demand for standards: if critics want authority, they have to earn it the old-fashioned way - by actually reading.